In the commons were John Isbell and Stephen Schanuel, working some problem on the blackboard. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. I would later pick my mom up, a recent widow, and take her to Church. Both Dr.Isbell and Dr. Schanuel were brilliant mathematicians. Their work is easy to find. Along with F. William Levere, the three of them were part of a hiring binge in the 60's, where the push was to make U.B. the Berkeley of the east.
Eventually these two would have a falling out, with one calling the other an "ineducable idiot." Also later on, two other professors would get drunk at a party and come to blows over the definition of infinity. There are a lot of divisions in the foundations of math - constructivists, intuitionists, etc. - with people staking their claims and willing to go to war over them.
I would go on to really enjoy spending 16 hours per day, or more, doing theoretical math. I am sure Art did at one time as well. None the less, that image of these two geniuses going at it, while life passed them by, remained vivid in my mind. There was a whole world of celebration going on a very short distance from Diefendorf Hall, down Main Street in Buffalo. Stores were decorated, people were shopping, children were anticipating, and the taverns were full of Christmas cheer. Yet, this was all these mathematicians had. Right or wrong, I believed at the time that these professors' whole life had shrunk to a point, on which danced a few math problems that were of no more cosmic significance than the page of theorems about angels the Scholastics had proved, and that Erasmus spoke disparagingly about in his seminal 1511 work, In Praise of Folly.
G. K. Chesterton, in his magnificent work Orthodoxy, pointed out that it is always the logician who goes mad, and almost never the poet or the artist. Chesterton got that right. He went on to say that logicians (and mathematicians) live in a really small world, unlike the artists, who live in a much larger and wonderful world. Logic does draw you in, with the prospect of certainty. In the end the world of certainty is a very small one, indeed, and logicians often cannot escape that small confined space. I managed to escape.
One professor I worked for in the department would lose their mind, and end up in a homeless shelter. Another committed suicide a few short years after she taught me logic. At the time I wondered if math made these people lose their minds, or if math attracted people who lost their minds. Abstract math can be very isolating, especially when, if you are at the top of the field, there may be only a handful of people who fully understand and appreciate what it is you are doing. Mathematicians can also be very arrogant. It is not good for the soul to look down your nose at humanity, and especially the least among us.
Art Hadley had a better life than these mathematicians. At one time he owned a Cessna. And those who knew Art would agree that he often lived life to the fullest.
It would not surprise me at all if by some metric, Art Hadley was brighter than both Dr. Isbell and Dr. Schanuel. I also thought that if I did what Dr. Isbell and Dr. Schanuel did for 40 years, I might be a whole lot better at it than them - that is, if I did not go mad in the meantime. Dr. Scott Williams, himself a well know topologist, told me I was by far the best graduate student he had in 20 years.
Now, after 44 years, teaching at a community college worked out well for me. I certainly have no regrets. There was a whole lot more to life than math. And many of the people who I trust the most, and respect the most, and enjoy hanging out with the most, are the poets, the musicians and blue collar workers. All of these fine individuals know a lot about life. Teaching at a community college kept me in touch with humanity.
More to come......
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